"Attention members of the public, you have one minute to reach minimum safe distance..."

I still want a bumper sticker that says that. When Carmageddon 2 came about we felt the same way, but it was quite taxing on our Pentium 200 MMX machines. The game was Carmageddon, but it didn't feel the same. If you look here and scroll down a bit you can see I was quite excited.

When Carmageddon 3 was announced they seemed to want to pick up the missing bits from Carmageddon 2 and put them back in the game. What did they accomplish?

The Good - This is the first Alpha to come out of SCI that actually works on my computer. Welcome back to world of Carmageddon, suddenly the old Eagle Mark III seems as pathetically slow to start moving as it was. The newer car gets off the line a lot less like it is stuck in peanut butter. The physics have improved and so have the graphics. Best of all the Tow Meister and the Suppressor are back.

The Bad - I've downloaded a 127mb file that only plays for 4 minutes? Sadly the answer to this is yes. Luckily Carmageddon City has the cure. It is also has a cure for the European zombies and being stuck with just the Eagle. Next sad bit is that it is a workout for my overclocked Celeron 550. You only notice a slowdown when the view angle changes, but it is there. My 2nd system is even worse. The K6-2 400 with the old Banshee just doesn't cut it. So much for the minimum system requirements of a Pentium 200.

The Ugly - I though the demo of Carmageddon 2 was pathetic. Having to unzip the whole thing before you could install it. This demo is worse. If you get the whole ZIP file, the next thing you notice is that it is 13 little ZIP files. Then you unzip the first one to find... A RAR file! Once you unzip all 13 RAR files, and then download WinRAR; you finally have a setup folder to work with. All that for 4 minutes of play! Then you have to look at the announcement pictures. The title screen, the plot, some game magazine getting all gushy about blood and gore, then the controls. It is really amazing that each of these screens stays up long enough to be annoying but not long enough to actually read any of them.

Wonderful, isn't it?

-Noxious?